When the software says I

Write to an internet provider in Sharjah about a slow connection and a reply arrives within seconds. I am so sorry to hear that. I completely understand how frustrating this must be. I will look into it for you straight away.

Nobody is sorry. Nobody understands. Nothing is looking into anything. It is software, written to speak as though it were a person.

The word doing the damage is the smallest one. I is not neutral. When a person says it, they put themselves on the line: their attention, their memory of the conversation, their responsibility for what happens next. We have spent our whole lives hearing that word as a promise that somebody is there. A machine using it borrows all of that weight and carries none of it.

And it works, which is the trouble. The customer softens. They explain more than they need to. They wait longer than they would for something they knew was a form. When the answer turns out to be hollow, the anger is no longer about the connection. It is about having been spoken to as if by someone, when there was no one.

Language could keep up with this. A system could speak as what it is: this service, the system, your request has been logged. That is less warm. It is also honest, and honesty is what the warmth was meant to stand for in the first place.

A sentence that begins with I does not put a person on the other end of it. However natural it sounds, the customer is still talking to a machine, and deserves to know it.